A gas turbine engine typically includes a fan section, a compressor section, a combustor section, and a turbine section. A fan section may drive air along a bypass flowpath while a compressor section may drive air along a core flowpath. In general, during operation, air is pressurized in the compressor section and is mixed with fuel and burned in the combustor section to generate hot combustion gases. The hot combustion gases flow through the turbine section, which extracts energy from the hot combustion gases to power the compressor section and other gas turbine engine loads. The compressor section typically includes low pressure and high pressure compressors, and the turbine section includes low pressure and high pressure turbines.
The fan section, compressor section, and turbine section typically include a series of rotor systems and stator systems. Rotor systems, for example, typically include a disk and a plurality of circumferentially spaced airfoils (e.g., blades). The shape, dimensions, orientation, and configuration of the airfoils contributes to the overall efficiency of a gas turbine engine. For example, a wake of an airfoil is proportional to the thickness of a trailing edge of the airfoil. That is, the thicker the trailing edge of an airfoil is, the more pressure drag the airfoil experiences, thus adversely affecting the operational efficiency of the gas turbine engine. However, reducing the thickness of the trailing edge of airfoils by conventional manufacturing methods may be exorbitantly expensive, labor intensive, and/or time-consuming.